The Call

Disclaimer: I do not own Animorphs.

The Yeerk waited while he full impact of direct contact with Tom's mind sank into my own. Tom was defeated. Desperate. He spent his time wishing he could die. He had given up any hope of escape. Given up.

{That's how it always is,} the Yeerk said. {At first the host fights, or at least tries. But hour after hour and day after day they see that they cannot rule their own bodies. The host sees that no one even knows what has happened to him. No one knows that he is lost in his own head. And, over time, hope dies. The host becomes a faint, shattered creature. Like your brother.} The Yeerk was telling the truth. That was what made it so terrible. It was true. I could feel Tom's complete, utter despair. I could feel that he had accepted defeat. I knew that all he wished for now was an end...

The next day I did something stupid. At least, Marco kept telling me it was stupid. But he didn't object very much. He understood. We all met at Cassie's barn. And I used her dad's cellular phone to call Tom at home. I went partly into a wolf morph before I did. Just enough to make the smalleset changes. Enough to change the shape of my mouth and tongue and throat. So that my voice would sound very different.

He picked up on the third ring. "Yeah?"

"I have a message," I said in a thick, twisted voice that did not sound at all like me.

"What?" Tom asked.

"Don't give up, Tom. Don't ever give up." I hung up before he could say anything...I wondered if he would have the strength to hold on. But I knew the answer. See, a part of my brother was in my own mind now.

-Animorphs #6.

When I got home that night, Tom was in a bad mood. Unsurprising, really. After the phone call I'd given him earlier today, his mood could hardly be anything else.

When I called him, I took all the precautions I could. I morphed enough to change my voice enough so that I was still able to be understood and yet not sound even vaguely like myself. In fact, I had to try three times in order to meet with my friends' approval. I called from Cassie's dad's cell phone out in the barn where nobody could overhear me doing this. I made sure to call when I knew that only Tom would be home so no one else would be involved. I even made sure to keep it short and to the point. Hemingway might have been able to make it more concise but I couldn't have.

It was just three sentences, twelve short words. "I have a message" and "Don't give up, Tom. Don't ever give up." Maybe I was on the line long enough for the Yeerks to have traced the call if they were expecting it but they weren't and as far as Ax knows, the Yeerks don't have the technology to retroactively trace a ten-to-fifteen second call.

In all probability, I had gotten away with it. Good. Finding some way to reassure him was all that I could think about but it wouldn't have been worth it if it led to the Yeerks finding us. Nothing would be worth that.

The fact that I'd gotten away with it was probably part of the reason Tom looked so annoyed as was the fact that he couldn't be sure of what it meant. It might have been an 'Andalite Bandit' calling his host to urge him not to give up but how could he be sure? He could report it but with no way to trace the call and no way to be certain of what it was, at best it would just be ignored. At worst…well, in the few months I've known Visser Three, I've come to appreciate that he doesn't deal with wastes of time very well. Or at all in a sane manner. But then, Visser Three doesn't do much in a sane manner. Neither do we, if you ask Marco. Newly motivated by his mother's plight or not, he's still Marco and still thinks we're just asking to get violently killed.

One of the things that I was both counting on and worrying about is the fact that the 'Andalite Bandits' would really have no reason to call Tom and try to give him hope or even to know who he was. Sure, Tom – the real Tom – had saved me by distracting the Visser the first time we had gone down to the Yeerk Pool which the new Yeerk should be aware of but would expressing gratitude towards a host be normal Andalite behavior? I'm increasingly noticing that Ax never tells us anything but I have gotten the impression that it wouldn't be.

It certainly seems unlikely that an Andalite would bother tracking the host in question down but should they happen upon that information…it's flimsy, I know, but at least it's an explanation. If nothing of the sort had happened and an 'Andalite Bandit' had made the call then it would be a lot more suspicious since it wasn't like we had decided to go on a calling hosts and attempting to help them regain the will to live binge or anything.

The new Yeerk would hopefully think it was an Andalite who had taken an interest for whatever reason (I even used Tom's name so it couldn't have been a wrong number. Well, probably not. 'Tom' is a pretty common name, after all) and not a human who knew. If the Yeerk did decide that it was a human then I'd be at risk. Since I'm only thirteen, I'd probably be less at risk than other, older people but it could still put my parents at risk.

And then, for all Tom knows it's not even about the Yeerk invasion. I didn't mention Yeerks or the invasion once in the three entire sentences I spoke. In the past week I told my dad not to give up his ongoing attempt to not burn the rolls, my mom not to give up trying to get the stain out of my favorite shirt, and Ax not to give up trying to ever pass as a normal human for longer than five minutes. For all Tom knew, I was telling him not to give up trying to pass pre-Calc. Granted, if it were something so innocuous and non-Yeerk-related then there was no need for all the secrecy. Still, the world is full of very strange people including secret admirers and stalkers so you could never really be sure.

Tom probably hadn't thought of these alternatives or had dismissed them and chosen to believe that it was an 'Andalite Bandit' calling for whatever reason and since this just happened to be the day after 'I' was acting weird for a couple of days, it did put us at more risk than it would normally. Still, the last Yeerk had been so eager to infest me and Visser Three so desperate to eliminate us after Visser One had embarrassed him by allowing us to escape that I really believe that if Tom had any suspicions about me I'd be on my way to the Yeerk Pool now.

I'm glad that it looks like I'm going to get away with this because I honestly don't know if I could have not done it. It was one thing to know that my brother had a Yeerk in his head seeing his every thought and controlling even the most miniscule and automatic of his actions. It was one thing going down to the Yeerk Pool and seeing how messed up and how desperate the temporarily freed hosts were and how badly they craved their freedom. It was quite another to see it for myself.

I had known the basic facts of infestation but I hadn't really known what it was like. And how could I? Our top two sources for information on the Yeerks, Elfangor and Ax, had never been infested – well, presumably – and so they wouldn't understand any better than we would. Being a Controller is about more than just the physical acts of losing control over your body and having someone read your every thought. It really messes you up. The Yeerk can target your every weakness and exploit it better than anyone else ever could. Any time you tried to argue against what the Yeerks were saying or doing it could pinpoint that one weakness in your argument and completely shut you down. It didn't make the Yeerk right or you pathetic but it's hard to keep that in perspective when the Yeerk continues to do this day in and day out. Even when they let up, it's not because of you but because they have something else to occupy their time or because they just lose interest in tormenting you.

I was only a Controller long enough to personally experience the very basic beginnings of the kind of hell most people go through. I did see the effects of that kind of torture, though. I saw it very clearly although it was only second-hand. I saw it in my brother.

I don't pretend to fully understand what he's been through. To do that would be an insult, I think. I do understand far better than I ever could have before, though, and I saw how his life was only a few short days ago. There was nothing particularly traumatizing about that morning at breakfast, I don't think. I may have been trying to decide if I could ever kill Tom if I had to but I had been wondering that on and off since the day we failed to save him. That I failed to save him. Tom's Yeerk had been trying to talk him into joining the Sharing but he always did that and I always said no. Nothing particularly unusual about that. That can only lead me to one conclusion: there was nothing unusual about that morning. That was how things stood every day.

Somehow that made it far worse than if I'd seen his worst moment.

And what the Yeerk said stuck with me. He said a lot of things but the one that stood out the most to me in his little rant about how he was going to break me was that people see that no one knows what's happening to them. That was one of the things that made Temrash's list of what caused hope to die. Time passes with no change in the situation, you can't control your own body, and no one has any idea.

And more to the point, the Yeerk had only had three hosts beside me. There was a Gedd and a Hork-Bajir and my brother. The Gedd and Hork-Bajir have been openly enslaved for years. Their friends and family and even just the random people they run into all know. The invasion of Earth is a stealthy one and virtually no one who isn't a Controller themselves knows. That can only be a human problem and the Yeerk had only infested one human.

That could only mean that one of the worst things for Tom about the fact that his very mind was stolen from him was the fact that none of us had realized. Sure, if we had we'd have only been made Controllers ourselves and he has to know that but that wouldn't make the fact that none of us did pick up on the fact that he'd been replaced any easier to bear.

I didn't notice. I feel like I should have. Of course I should have. A Yeerk came and stole my brother's body and it didn't even register to me? I still can't believe it. Sure, I noticed that we'd been spending less time together but I just thought it was one of those things that happened when you got older. I wasn't happy about it but I had thought that it was normal.

If only.

I'm getting this growing fear that even if the war ended tomorrow that it wouldn't be enough. That people like my brother couldn't just go back to their normal lives as if nothing happened. There will be lasting effects of being a Controller and I have no idea how to deal with that. Sending them to a therapist, maybe? Would a therapist even know what they're going through without having been through it themselves and thus need therapy as well? I guess it's kind of like having multiple personality disorder and kind of like having locked-in syndrome. Logically, I know that the day I'll have to worry about that is a long time off - if it ever comes - but I can't help it.

I know that one simple little phone call won't be enough to turn things around and it can't make it better but I guess that I thought that if he just had one little bit of hope, one tiny bit of proof that someone out there knew and cared enough to take the risk of letting him know that they knew…maybe it would make things just a little bit easier. Maybe it would give him the strength to keep going.

It's what I choose to believe at any rate.

"You're staring at me again," Tom announced.

I really have got to stop doing that or I might make him suspicious…or freak him out. Both would be bad, particularly since I'm still not quite sure what happened with Ax while I was off learning far more than I ever wanted to about how the other half lives.

"We went over this, remember? Your forehead, empty space…" I trailed off.

Tom rolled his eyes. "You have got to stop using that line."

"Only when it stops being funny," I replied.

"It was never funny," Tom insisted.

I forced a smile. I've been getting better at that lately. "I think you might be slightly biased."

Another eye roll. "Whatever."

"So what's got you in such a bad mood?" I asked innocently, vaguely wondering what he'd say.

"Oh, nothing much," Tom lied. "Just this stupid prank call earlier."

"What, like 'is your refrigerator running'?" I asked.

Tom shrugged. "Something like that."

"I've never really gotten those," I remarked. "I mean, even if someone didn't know the old joke, why would they tell some random stranger on the telephone if their refrigerator is working?"

"I guess people don't really think that much about it," Tom answered. "Listen, it's really not a big deal. I just don't like it when people waste my time like that."

Oh, I just bet he doesn't.

Fortunately for him, he won't have to deal with any more 'prank' calls from me due to the security risk. He and I, however, are far from done.

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